Isobel Hurst
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199283514
- eISBN:
- 9780191712715
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199283514.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This book brings together two lines of enquiry in recent criticism: the reception of ancient Greece and Rome, and women as writers and readers in the 19th century. A classical education has been ...
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This book brings together two lines of enquiry in recent criticism: the reception of ancient Greece and Rome, and women as writers and readers in the 19th century. A classical education has been characterized as almost an exclusively male prerogative, but women writers had a greater imaginative engagement with classical literature than has previously been acknowledged. To offer a more accurate impression of the influence of the classics in Victorian women's literary culture, women's difficulties in gaining access to classical learning are explored through biographical and fictional representations of the development of women's education from solitary study at home to compulsory classics at university. The restrictions which applied to women's classical learning liberated them from the repressive and sometimes alienating effects of a traditional classical education, enabling women writers to produce distinctive literary responses to the classical tradition. Women readers focused on image, plot, and character rather than grammar, leading to imaginative and often subversive reworkings of classical texts. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot have been granted an exceptional status as 19th-century female classicists. This book places them in a literary tradition in which revising classical narratives in forms such as the novel and the dramatic monologue offered women the opportunity to express controversial ideas. The reworking of classical texts serves a variety of purposes: to validate women's claims to authorship, to demand access to education, to highlight feminist issues through the heroines of ancient tragedy, and to repudiate the warrior ethos of ancient epic.Less
This book brings together two lines of enquiry in recent criticism: the reception of ancient Greece and Rome, and women as writers and readers in the 19th century. A classical education has been characterized as almost an exclusively male prerogative, but women writers had a greater imaginative engagement with classical literature than has previously been acknowledged. To offer a more accurate impression of the influence of the classics in Victorian women's literary culture, women's difficulties in gaining access to classical learning are explored through biographical and fictional representations of the development of women's education from solitary study at home to compulsory classics at university. The restrictions which applied to women's classical learning liberated them from the repressive and sometimes alienating effects of a traditional classical education, enabling women writers to produce distinctive literary responses to the classical tradition. Women readers focused on image, plot, and character rather than grammar, leading to imaginative and often subversive reworkings of classical texts. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot have been granted an exceptional status as 19th-century female classicists. This book places them in a literary tradition in which revising classical narratives in forms such as the novel and the dramatic monologue offered women the opportunity to express controversial ideas. The reworking of classical texts serves a variety of purposes: to validate women's claims to authorship, to demand access to education, to highlight feminist issues through the heroines of ancient tragedy, and to repudiate the warrior ethos of ancient epic.
David Kurnick
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691151519
- eISBN:
- 9781400840090
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691151519.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter focuses on George Eliot's tangled engagement with the drama. It begins with an analysis of the mutual constitution of theatricalized space and characterological interiority in Romola ...
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This chapter focuses on George Eliot's tangled engagement with the drama. It begins with an analysis of the mutual constitution of theatricalized space and characterological interiority in Romola (1863) and Felix Holt (1866)—transitional novels in which her emphasis on psychological inwardness works at the expense of demonized crowds. But during this period she also undertook a dramatic work that challenged her most fundamental formal and ethical commitments. Conceived as a play but published as an epic poem mixing dramatic and narrative forms, The Spanish Gypsy shows Eliot refusing both the novel as a form and the inward cultivation it seems designed to encourage. The Spanish Gypsy includes narrative passages that take the grammatical form of free indirect discourse, in which a character's habits of mind are mimicked by the narrator's prose. But the exteriorized perspective demanded by the dramatic origin of The Spanish Gypsy assures that these eminently psychologizing sentences emanate from and attach to no character in particular, instead appearing to echo in an auditorium populated with spectators. Eliot carried this experiment in externalized forms of psychological narration into the novels she wrote next, Middlemarch (1871–72) and especially Daniel Deronda (1876).Less
This chapter focuses on George Eliot's tangled engagement with the drama. It begins with an analysis of the mutual constitution of theatricalized space and characterological interiority in Romola (1863) and Felix Holt (1866)—transitional novels in which her emphasis on psychological inwardness works at the expense of demonized crowds. But during this period she also undertook a dramatic work that challenged her most fundamental formal and ethical commitments. Conceived as a play but published as an epic poem mixing dramatic and narrative forms, The Spanish Gypsy shows Eliot refusing both the novel as a form and the inward cultivation it seems designed to encourage. The Spanish Gypsy includes narrative passages that take the grammatical form of free indirect discourse, in which a character's habits of mind are mimicked by the narrator's prose. But the exteriorized perspective demanded by the dramatic origin of The Spanish Gypsy assures that these eminently psychologizing sentences emanate from and attach to no character in particular, instead appearing to echo in an auditorium populated with spectators. Eliot carried this experiment in externalized forms of psychological narration into the novels she wrote next, Middlemarch (1871–72) and especially Daniel Deronda (1876).
Amy M. King
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195161519
- eISBN:
- 9780199787838
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195161519.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the 18th century, and exploring the variations it spawned — natural history, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's ...
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Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the 18th century, and exploring the variations it spawned — natural history, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's prurience — this book offers a fresh reading of the courtship novel from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James. By reanimating a cultural understanding of botany and sexuality that we have lost, it provides a new and powerful account of the novel's role in scripting sexualized courtship, and illuminates how the novel and popular science together created a cultural figure, the blooming girl, that stood at the center of both fictional and scientific worlds.Less
Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the 18th century, and exploring the variations it spawned — natural history, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's prurience — this book offers a fresh reading of the courtship novel from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James. By reanimating a cultural understanding of botany and sexuality that we have lost, it provides a new and powerful account of the novel's role in scripting sexualized courtship, and illuminates how the novel and popular science together created a cultural figure, the blooming girl, that stood at the center of both fictional and scientific worlds.
Kent Puckett
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195332759
- eISBN:
- 9780199868131
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332759.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the ...
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While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the novel and its rise? Who knew that the novel in fact relies on its characters’ mistakes for its structural coherence, for its authority, for its form? Drawing simultaneously on the terms of narrative theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, this book examines the necessary relation between social and literary form in the nineteenth-century novel as it is expressed at the site of the represented social mistake (eating peas with your knife, wearing the wrong thing, talking out of turn, etc.). Through close and careful readings of novels by Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, this book shows that the novel achieves its coherence at the level of character, plot, and narration not in spite but because of the social mistake.Less
While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the novel and its rise? Who knew that the novel in fact relies on its characters’ mistakes for its structural coherence, for its authority, for its form? Drawing simultaneously on the terms of narrative theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, this book examines the necessary relation between social and literary form in the nineteenth-century novel as it is expressed at the site of the represented social mistake (eating peas with your knife, wearing the wrong thing, talking out of turn, etc.). Through close and careful readings of novels by Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, this book shows that the novel achieves its coherence at the level of character, plot, and narration not in spite but because of the social mistake.
Robert Macfarlane
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199296507
- eISBN:
- 9780191711916
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199296507.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter focuses on George Eliot's Impressions of Theophrastus Such. It argues that Impressions should not be understood as a full-blown assault on the doctrines of originality and authenticity. ...
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This chapter focuses on George Eliot's Impressions of Theophrastus Such. It argues that Impressions should not be understood as a full-blown assault on the doctrines of originality and authenticity. Although George Eliot espouses a conception of literary property which shows itself to be antagonistic towards those who claim absolute intellectual monopolies, she does not ‘entirely erase the distinction between Mine and Thine’. Although she criticizes certain aspects of the conception of originality as creatio, she does not entirely debunk its possibility. Impressions contests the topography which locates origination as taking place in the hollow round of the single skull, and suggests instead an Emersonian concept of the author as a highly skilled selector and combiner: an anthologist of language.Less
This chapter focuses on George Eliot's Impressions of Theophrastus Such. It argues that Impressions should not be understood as a full-blown assault on the doctrines of originality and authenticity. Although George Eliot espouses a conception of literary property which shows itself to be antagonistic towards those who claim absolute intellectual monopolies, she does not ‘entirely erase the distinction between Mine and Thine’. Although she criticizes certain aspects of the conception of originality as creatio, she does not entirely debunk its possibility. Impressions contests the topography which locates origination as taking place in the hollow round of the single skull, and suggests instead an Emersonian concept of the author as a highly skilled selector and combiner: an anthologist of language.
Michiel Heyns
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182702
- eISBN:
- 9780191673870
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182702.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter considers George Eliot's last novel and last heroine as a manifestation of duality. In Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen Harleth is a participant in a conflict of which she is ultimately the ...
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This chapter considers George Eliot's last novel and last heroine as a manifestation of duality. In Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen Harleth is a participant in a conflict of which she is ultimately the victim: that is, her spiritual struggle is part of a larger debate in Eliot's fiction, and her ‘conversion’ is the defeat and attempted nullification of those realist values which give her fictional identity. In discovering the smallness of her own world and her own self, Gwendolen is reduced to a ‘speck’ against the visionary horizon of Mordecai and Daniel Deronda, which Eliot attempts to dramatise as a higher reality. Gwendolen can find no place in Eliot's narrative community other than as the wistful outsider, trying to understand the scale of values that has reduced her to insignificance.Less
This chapter considers George Eliot's last novel and last heroine as a manifestation of duality. In Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen Harleth is a participant in a conflict of which she is ultimately the victim: that is, her spiritual struggle is part of a larger debate in Eliot's fiction, and her ‘conversion’ is the defeat and attempted nullification of those realist values which give her fictional identity. In discovering the smallness of her own world and her own self, Gwendolen is reduced to a ‘speck’ against the visionary horizon of Mordecai and Daniel Deronda, which Eliot attempts to dramatise as a higher reality. Gwendolen can find no place in Eliot's narrative community other than as the wistful outsider, trying to understand the scale of values that has reduced her to insignificance.
Stephen Gill
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198119654
- eISBN:
- 9780191671180
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119654.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
George Eliot's relationship with William Wordsworth was always ardent and strong. By her twentieth birthday in 1839 she had read at least half of his poems and the associated prose and throughout the ...
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George Eliot's relationship with William Wordsworth was always ardent and strong. By her twentieth birthday in 1839 she had read at least half of his poems and the associated prose and throughout the late 1840s and the 1850s she alluded to them in her letters, reviews, and essays. This chapter deals with George Eliot's fascination with William Wordsworth's poetry and its impact on her literary career. Her pleasure in Wordsworth's poetry remained keen and so did her appetite for it in its entirety. The affinity between the novelist and poet around extends beyond the choice of subject-matter. What is striking is the similarity of the way in which George Eliot and Wordsworth highlight their choice and its significance.Less
George Eliot's relationship with William Wordsworth was always ardent and strong. By her twentieth birthday in 1839 she had read at least half of his poems and the associated prose and throughout the late 1840s and the 1850s she alluded to them in her letters, reviews, and essays. This chapter deals with George Eliot's fascination with William Wordsworth's poetry and its impact on her literary career. Her pleasure in Wordsworth's poetry remained keen and so did her appetite for it in its entirety. The affinity between the novelist and poet around extends beyond the choice of subject-matter. What is striking is the similarity of the way in which George Eliot and Wordsworth highlight their choice and its significance.
Amy M. King
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195161519
- eISBN:
- 9780199787838
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195161519.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter traces the way George Eliot's novels extend the courtship plot to nonmarital sexuality, or what Linnaeus called “clandestine marriage.” It explores how 19th-century natural history and ...
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This chapter traces the way George Eliot's novels extend the courtship plot to nonmarital sexuality, or what Linnaeus called “clandestine marriage.” It explores how 19th-century natural history and its classificatory energies are employed by Eliot to not only represent versions of courtship anticipated by Linnaeus (yet neglected by novelists) but also to achieve, more broadly, a new kind of realism in which the representation of the social world is achieved through organizing principles derived from natural history.Less
This chapter traces the way George Eliot's novels extend the courtship plot to nonmarital sexuality, or what Linnaeus called “clandestine marriage.” It explores how 19th-century natural history and its classificatory energies are employed by Eliot to not only represent versions of courtship anticipated by Linnaeus (yet neglected by novelists) but also to achieve, more broadly, a new kind of realism in which the representation of the social world is achieved through organizing principles derived from natural history.
J. B. BULLEN
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198128885
- eISBN:
- 9780191671722
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128885.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
George Eliot’s Romola occupies a unique place in the nineteenth-century historiography of the Renaissance. Written in the early 1860s, the novel comes approximately midway between the negative ...
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George Eliot’s Romola occupies a unique place in the nineteenth-century historiography of the Renaissance. Written in the early 1860s, the novel comes approximately midway between the negative account of Renaissance culture in John Ruskin and the quite different version offered by Walter Pater in the early 1870s. Whereas both Ruskin and Pater identify the Renaissance as a coherent period and can be considered Organicist historians, Eliot, at the narrative level, more closely resembles the so-called Formist historian. The metahistory of Romola is not one which subscribes to the theory of a coherent period called the Renaissance. On the contrary, the image of the fifteenth century, as it appears in this novel, is divergent; it is one of difference, and contradiction. The stresses between conflicting moral ideas, the collision of political positions, the clash of antithetical human temperaments, and the struggle between religious belief and humanism are precisely the forces which bring about the fictional ‘awakening’ of Romola. In Romola, Eliot offers a picture of fifteenth-century Italy which is substantially divergent.Less
George Eliot’s Romola occupies a unique place in the nineteenth-century historiography of the Renaissance. Written in the early 1860s, the novel comes approximately midway between the negative account of Renaissance culture in John Ruskin and the quite different version offered by Walter Pater in the early 1870s. Whereas both Ruskin and Pater identify the Renaissance as a coherent period and can be considered Organicist historians, Eliot, at the narrative level, more closely resembles the so-called Formist historian. The metahistory of Romola is not one which subscribes to the theory of a coherent period called the Renaissance. On the contrary, the image of the fifteenth century, as it appears in this novel, is divergent; it is one of difference, and contradiction. The stresses between conflicting moral ideas, the collision of political positions, the clash of antithetical human temperaments, and the struggle between religious belief and humanism are precisely the forces which bring about the fictional ‘awakening’ of Romola. In Romola, Eliot offers a picture of fifteenth-century Italy which is substantially divergent.
Clare Pettitt
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199253203
- eISBN:
- 9780191719172
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199253203.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
In March 1856, a petition was presented in the British Parliament, by Lord Brougham in the Upper House and by Sir Erskine Perry in the Commons. The petition called for property rights for married ...
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In March 1856, a petition was presented in the British Parliament, by Lord Brougham in the Upper House and by Sir Erskine Perry in the Commons. The petition called for property rights for married women, but what is striking is that it was submitted by, and rapidly became associated very closely with, female literary writers. This chapter examines how women writers in Victorian England negotiated the inheritance of a highly gendered model of creativity and intellectual property, focusing on Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Unlike William Thackeray and Charles Dickens, Gaskell and Eliot were not publicly involved with the debate about authorship in the 1850s, or with the campaign to improve copyright protection.Less
In March 1856, a petition was presented in the British Parliament, by Lord Brougham in the Upper House and by Sir Erskine Perry in the Commons. The petition called for property rights for married women, but what is striking is that it was submitted by, and rapidly became associated very closely with, female literary writers. This chapter examines how women writers in Victorian England negotiated the inheritance of a highly gendered model of creativity and intellectual property, focusing on Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Unlike William Thackeray and Charles Dickens, Gaskell and Eliot were not publicly involved with the debate about authorship in the 1850s, or with the campaign to improve copyright protection.
Jane Wood
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198187608
- eISBN:
- 9780191674723
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187608.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
In what was once described as ‘the century of nerves’, a fascination with the mysterious processes governing physical and psychological states was shared by medical and fiction writers alike. This ...
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In what was once described as ‘the century of nerves’, a fascination with the mysterious processes governing physical and psychological states was shared by medical and fiction writers alike. This elegant study offers an integrated analysis of how medicine and literature figured the connection between the body and the mind. The book looks at some of the century's most influential neurological and physiological theories, and gives readings of both major and relatively neglected fictions — a range which includes work by Charlotte Brontë and George MacDonald, George Eliot and Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and George Gissing. Stepping into an already lively area of interdisciplinary debate, this book is distinguished by its recognition of the intellectual and imaginative force of both discourses: it extends our understanding of the interaction between science and literature in the wider culture of the period.Less
In what was once described as ‘the century of nerves’, a fascination with the mysterious processes governing physical and psychological states was shared by medical and fiction writers alike. This elegant study offers an integrated analysis of how medicine and literature figured the connection between the body and the mind. The book looks at some of the century's most influential neurological and physiological theories, and gives readings of both major and relatively neglected fictions — a range which includes work by Charlotte Brontë and George MacDonald, George Eliot and Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and George Gissing. Stepping into an already lively area of interdisciplinary debate, this book is distinguished by its recognition of the intellectual and imaginative force of both discourses: it extends our understanding of the interaction between science and literature in the wider culture of the period.
Kent Puckett
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195332759
- eISBN:
- 9780199868131
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332759.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
George Eliot’s most successful characters tend to show a marked disdain for the fluctuations of fashion. Felix Holt, Dorothea Brooke, Daniel Deronda: all of these are represented as figures who ...
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George Eliot’s most successful characters tend to show a marked disdain for the fluctuations of fashion. Felix Holt, Dorothea Brooke, Daniel Deronda: all of these are represented as figures who couldn’t care less about what’s in style at any given moment. This chapter works to understand how the novel as a system is able to produce the effect of stylelessness in the novel and at what cost. It argues, in other words, that in all of Eliot’s novels and especially in Middlemarch, the absence of style is the result not only of rigged comparisons with those who have already fallen into mere stylishness, but also of competitions between differently valued narrative techniques. That is, at exactly the moment when we would expect Middlemarch to be its best, we find it passionately caught up in a game it seemed at first unwilling even to play.Less
George Eliot’s most successful characters tend to show a marked disdain for the fluctuations of fashion. Felix Holt, Dorothea Brooke, Daniel Deronda: all of these are represented as figures who couldn’t care less about what’s in style at any given moment. This chapter works to understand how the novel as a system is able to produce the effect of stylelessness in the novel and at what cost. It argues, in other words, that in all of Eliot’s novels and especially in Middlemarch, the absence of style is the result not only of rigged comparisons with those who have already fallen into mere stylishness, but also of competitions between differently valued narrative techniques. That is, at exactly the moment when we would expect Middlemarch to be its best, we find it passionately caught up in a game it seemed at first unwilling even to play.
Nicholas Dames
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199208968
- eISBN:
- 9780191695759
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199208968.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter explores the problem of elongated artistic forms — forms whose length makes continuous, heightened attention impossible and acts of recollection difficult — by triangulating Richard ...
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This chapter explores the problem of elongated artistic forms — forms whose length makes continuous, heightened attention impossible and acts of recollection difficult — by triangulating Richard Wagner's impact upon British musical culture, George Eliot's role in that relation, and the physiological musicology that was the primary language through which Eliot, among other observers, approached Wagnerian opera, and that served to bridge novels like Daniel Deronda (1876), and music drama, as parallel temporal experiences.Less
This chapter explores the problem of elongated artistic forms — forms whose length makes continuous, heightened attention impossible and acts of recollection difficult — by triangulating Richard Wagner's impact upon British musical culture, George Eliot's role in that relation, and the physiological musicology that was the primary language through which Eliot, among other observers, approached Wagnerian opera, and that served to bridge novels like Daniel Deronda (1876), and music drama, as parallel temporal experiences.
Ian Duncan
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691175072
- eISBN:
- 9780691194189
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691175072.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This concluding chapter focuses on George Eliot's Middlemarch. The main business of Middlemarch, formulated as the premise of its opening rhetorical question, is with a scientific project, “the ...
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This concluding chapter focuses on George Eliot's Middlemarch. The main business of Middlemarch, formulated as the premise of its opening rhetorical question, is with a scientific project, “the history of man.” While George Eliot's literary career coincided with Charles Darwin's, she did not immediately digest his theory; her fiction activates other developmental forces besides natural selection, and deranges the scientific thought it brings into play. In doing so, it churns up the not-yet-settled, volatile currents of that scientific thought-including Darwin's, who was not always (himself) a pure Darwinist. With that, it deranges its own aesthetic protocols, so often read as an Olympian consummation of Victorian realism. “To a degree that the catchall term 'realism' obscures,” writes Lauren Goodlad, “Eliot's oeuvre is generically diverse, bold, and experimental.” The chapter seeks to recapture the unsettling force of that experimentalism: to make George Eliot strange again.Less
This concluding chapter focuses on George Eliot's Middlemarch. The main business of Middlemarch, formulated as the premise of its opening rhetorical question, is with a scientific project, “the history of man.” While George Eliot's literary career coincided with Charles Darwin's, she did not immediately digest his theory; her fiction activates other developmental forces besides natural selection, and deranges the scientific thought it brings into play. In doing so, it churns up the not-yet-settled, volatile currents of that scientific thought-including Darwin's, who was not always (himself) a pure Darwinist. With that, it deranges its own aesthetic protocols, so often read as an Olympian consummation of Victorian realism. “To a degree that the catchall term 'realism' obscures,” writes Lauren Goodlad, “Eliot's oeuvre is generically diverse, bold, and experimental.” The chapter seeks to recapture the unsettling force of that experimentalism: to make George Eliot strange again.
John Beer
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184362
- eISBN:
- 9780191674228
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184362.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter focuses on George Eliot. It discusses how Wordsworth offered a point of stability as she modified and retreated from her Christian orthodoxy, her partnership with George Henry Lewes, and ...
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This chapter focuses on George Eliot. It discusses how Wordsworth offered a point of stability as she modified and retreated from her Christian orthodoxy, her partnership with George Henry Lewes, and how Cambridge brought out the serious side of her personality.Less
This chapter focuses on George Eliot. It discusses how Wordsworth offered a point of stability as she modified and retreated from her Christian orthodoxy, her partnership with George Henry Lewes, and how Cambridge brought out the serious side of her personality.
Michiel Heyns
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182702
- eISBN:
- 9780191673870
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182702.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book examines the notion that the realist novel reinforces existing social structures through its techniques of representation. It depicts the 19th-century literary scapegoat — the ostensible ...
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This book examines the notion that the realist novel reinforces existing social structures through its techniques of representation. It depicts the 19th-century literary scapegoat — the ostensible victim of the expulsive pressure of plot — as begetter of an alternative vision, questioning the values apparently upheld by the novel as a whole. Novels, like communities, need scapegoats to rid them of their unexpressed anxieties. This has placed the realist novel under suspicion of collaborating with established authority, by reproducing the very structures it often seeks to criticise. This book investigates this charge through close and illuminating readings of five realist novels of the 19th century: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, and Henry James's The Golden Bowl. The book looks at these works in relation to one another, to their literary and social contexts, and to modern critical thinking. Sceptical of unexamined abstractions, but appreciative of the acumen of much recent criticism, this book places the realist novel at the centre of current debates, while respecting the power of literature to anticipate the insights of its critics.Less
This book examines the notion that the realist novel reinforces existing social structures through its techniques of representation. It depicts the 19th-century literary scapegoat — the ostensible victim of the expulsive pressure of plot — as begetter of an alternative vision, questioning the values apparently upheld by the novel as a whole. Novels, like communities, need scapegoats to rid them of their unexpressed anxieties. This has placed the realist novel under suspicion of collaborating with established authority, by reproducing the very structures it often seeks to criticise. This book investigates this charge through close and illuminating readings of five realist novels of the 19th century: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, and Henry James's The Golden Bowl. The book looks at these works in relation to one another, to their literary and social contexts, and to modern critical thinking. Sceptical of unexamined abstractions, but appreciative of the acumen of much recent criticism, this book places the realist novel at the centre of current debates, while respecting the power of literature to anticipate the insights of its critics.
Isobel Hurst
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199283514
- eISBN:
- 9780191712715
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199283514.003.0006
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter examines the use of Greek heroines such as Medea, Antigone, and Alcestis, and historical figures like Xantippe and Aspasia, to explore feminist issues in the work of George Eliot, Eliza ...
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This chapter examines the use of Greek heroines such as Medea, Antigone, and Alcestis, and historical figures like Xantippe and Aspasia, to explore feminist issues in the work of George Eliot, Eliza Lynn Linton, Augusta Webster, and Amy Levy. In translations, dramatic monologues and novels, ancient heroines could speak eloquently of the wrongs of women in a way which resonated with Victorian readers. Characters from the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, especially Medea, the vengeful victim whose motivation for killing her rival and her own children could be cast in terms of a rebellion against patriarchal society, and Alcestis, the wife who gives up her life for an ungrateful husband, allowed these writers to explore women's anger and violence in a safely distanced context.Less
This chapter examines the use of Greek heroines such as Medea, Antigone, and Alcestis, and historical figures like Xantippe and Aspasia, to explore feminist issues in the work of George Eliot, Eliza Lynn Linton, Augusta Webster, and Amy Levy. In translations, dramatic monologues and novels, ancient heroines could speak eloquently of the wrongs of women in a way which resonated with Victorian readers. Characters from the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, especially Medea, the vengeful victim whose motivation for killing her rival and her own children could be cast in terms of a rebellion against patriarchal society, and Alcestis, the wife who gives up her life for an ungrateful husband, allowed these writers to explore women's anger and violence in a safely distanced context.
Margaret Pelling
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199253456
- eISBN:
- 9780191698149
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199253456.003.0013
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This chapter examines the contemporary significance of Middlemarch, a book written by George Eliot. The main focus has been on scientific ideas or research, or medicine in its public aspect. Still in ...
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This chapter examines the contemporary significance of Middlemarch, a book written by George Eliot. The main focus has been on scientific ideas or research, or medicine in its public aspect. Still in this context, slight but honourable mention should be given to those medical men who have always been appreciative of the connections between medicine and literature, which they see as an aspect of the humane and liberal side of medicine. These connections have long been asserted at a different, more political level, to help substantiate the claim of medicine to join the ranks of the learned professions. In general, some contemporaries found it an oppressive and unnecessary parade of undesirably up-to-date ideas.Less
This chapter examines the contemporary significance of Middlemarch, a book written by George Eliot. The main focus has been on scientific ideas or research, or medicine in its public aspect. Still in this context, slight but honourable mention should be given to those medical men who have always been appreciative of the connections between medicine and literature, which they see as an aspect of the humane and liberal side of medicine. These connections have long been asserted at a different, more political level, to help substantiate the claim of medicine to join the ranks of the learned professions. In general, some contemporaries found it an oppressive and unnecessary parade of undesirably up-to-date ideas.
Michiel Heyns
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182702
- eISBN:
- 9780191673870
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182702.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book examines five central realist novels, in relation to one another and other works, hoping to demonstrate both the connectedness and the dissimilarity of the dynamics of novelistic ...
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This book examines five central realist novels, in relation to one another and other works, hoping to demonstrate both the connectedness and the dissimilarity of the dynamics of novelistic representation and the mechanics of social control. These are Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, and Henry James's The Golden Bowl. Scapegoating is, as René Girard has shown, a mob effect, the mobilisation of the prejudices of a society in times of crisis. If one defines the literary scapegoat as that figure that has to bear the burden of guilt of a particular community, usually by being sacrificed or expelled, then, in the model, the narrative itself constitutes a community, generating pressures that eventually expel those characters that disturb the equilibrium which it is the aim of narrative closure to restore. The book attempts to gauge the pressures generated by narrative to void it of those elements impeding the resolution, but also to record the countervailing resistance of realist representation to the coercion of closure.Less
This book examines five central realist novels, in relation to one another and other works, hoping to demonstrate both the connectedness and the dissimilarity of the dynamics of novelistic representation and the mechanics of social control. These are Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, and Henry James's The Golden Bowl. Scapegoating is, as René Girard has shown, a mob effect, the mobilisation of the prejudices of a society in times of crisis. If one defines the literary scapegoat as that figure that has to bear the burden of guilt of a particular community, usually by being sacrificed or expelled, then, in the model, the narrative itself constitutes a community, generating pressures that eventually expel those characters that disturb the equilibrium which it is the aim of narrative closure to restore. The book attempts to gauge the pressures generated by narrative to void it of those elements impeding the resolution, but also to record the countervailing resistance of realist representation to the coercion of closure.
J. B. Bullen
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198128885
- eISBN:
- 9780191671722
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128885.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Few people who use the word ‘Renaissance’ today realize that it is a comparatively recent historical idea, or that it is a ‘myth’ or story constructed by writers to explain the past. This innovative ...
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Few people who use the word ‘Renaissance’ today realize that it is a comparatively recent historical idea, or that it is a ‘myth’ or story constructed by writers to explain the past. This innovative and wide-ranging book traces the genesis of that myth back to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The seeds of the idea are to be found in Voltaire, but the book shows how it was taken up by French art historians and Gothic revivalists as an important element in the acrimonious political and religious debates with French historiography. The book’s main focus, however, is on English intellectual life and the ways in which writers like Augustus Welby Pugin, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, and George Eliot took up the terms established by Victor Hugo, Francis Alexis Rio, and Jules Michelet in France and adapted a reading of fifteenth-century Italy to suit the special conditions of Victorian England. Ultimately, in the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, Walter Horatio Pater, and John Addington Symonds the Renaissance became a key factor in relating ethics and aesthetics, and in its late nineteenth-century phase, the myth figures prominently in an important discussion about the relationship between power, authority, and individualism.Less
Few people who use the word ‘Renaissance’ today realize that it is a comparatively recent historical idea, or that it is a ‘myth’ or story constructed by writers to explain the past. This innovative and wide-ranging book traces the genesis of that myth back to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The seeds of the idea are to be found in Voltaire, but the book shows how it was taken up by French art historians and Gothic revivalists as an important element in the acrimonious political and religious debates with French historiography. The book’s main focus, however, is on English intellectual life and the ways in which writers like Augustus Welby Pugin, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, and George Eliot took up the terms established by Victor Hugo, Francis Alexis Rio, and Jules Michelet in France and adapted a reading of fifteenth-century Italy to suit the special conditions of Victorian England. Ultimately, in the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, Walter Horatio Pater, and John Addington Symonds the Renaissance became a key factor in relating ethics and aesthetics, and in its late nineteenth-century phase, the myth figures prominently in an important discussion about the relationship between power, authority, and individualism.
